personal development on HIV/AIDS

Lord God–Father, Son and Holy Spirit: we hear your Word and sing your praises. We meet at the Table and partake of your Sacrament–the gospel made visible. You call us to yourself, and you send us out ...

We thank you, God our Father, that by your grace, mercy and love, expressed today in Word and Sacrament, You give us Your Son, the true bread from heaven and the fountain of living water. Strengthen u...

Lord Jesus–You’ve come, are coming and will come again. Whether we know it or not, we live on the edge of Your advent every moment of every day either with anticipation or with anxiety. As if stumblin...

The same week the global economy shrank by $7 trillion, Zimbabwe’s inflation rate hit a record 231 million percent. In other words, if you had saved $1 million Zimbabwean dollars by Monday, on Tuesday...

Population studies indicate that something is going terribly wrong: people ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle ...

As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining t...

Gracious God, We come before you today scared. Scared for our health, scared for our jobs, scared for our loved ones. Help us Lord, not to dwell in our fears, but rather to turn to you, trusting that...

“A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”

I sense that mental illness resembles a bone fracture. Bones have remarkable durability, but also, once broken, can rapidly heal and be reset. With normal daily use, one might never be aware of past p...

Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from “unipolar” depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ...

We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. ...

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

I recently had lunch with a former British boarding school chaplain. He remembers being with the boys in his school the morning thirty years ago that the very first pictures of widespread starvation i...

God of all mercies, Father Jesus and our Father–You know us intimately ... and you still love us immensely. Therefore, we come confident of your welcoming embrace, your gracious attention and your lov...

The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they're still alive.

Which is mostly how mental illness works. You don’t know you have it until it’s all up in your grill trying to destroy your life. This happens, most often, because getting honest with ourselves about ...

Everybody’s got a hungry heart.

Health is not valued till sickness comes.

O God of the ages, you have created each of us uniquely. We each have so much that makes us interesting and unique! Yet at times, even against our own wishes, we find ourselves falling prey to the -is...

God invites us into his healing presence with these words: “I am the Lord, who heals you.” Diseased, depressed, dysfunctional, defeated, we come hungering for health that only God can provide. God c...

God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—You are ever the same in Your grace and truth, Your power and love; Yet, You always challenge us to grow, change and become more like Jesus. We’re not yet what we w...

In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which gets rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

This [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic fea...

I was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity. For long I have puzzled over the causes of my psychological anguish.

As my AA, NA, and CA friends have repeatedly reminded me, rigorous honesty is the first rule of recovery.

The living God has come with healing and hope in Jesus Christ, has picked up the battered and dying world, and has bound up its wounds and set it on the road to full health.

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangel...

“Well you know what they say, 'Hugging is a great way to hide your face.'”

In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...

What is the solution? I once asked the former head of a major Christian relief and development organization what he had learned in his decades of experience in the field of poverty alleviation. …he sa...